December 24 - 31, 1998
![[98 in Review - News]](/standard/image/headers/98_in_review_header_1.gif)
Saturday afternoon. The House has just voted for one article of impeachment. And ABC's Sam Donaldson is doing a standup outside the White House. The triumph of the real
The media think it's all about them. Sex, war, and impeachment prove otherwise.
News Year in Review by Dan Kennedy
Peter Jennings interrupts. He can hear protesters shouting and chanting just off camera. What, he asks Donaldson, is their message to the president?
Donaldson's sad, smug response: They're protesting the media's role in all this. They're protesting me. He and Jennings let the moment hang in the air for a bit, as Donaldson's trademark bad-boy smile spreads across his weirdly smooth sixtysomething features.
It was, on a number of levels, the perfect snapshot of Media Nation in a year when the press spent three weeks chasing reports that Bill Clinton had done the nasty or something like it in the Oval Office -- and then spent the rest of the year having a nervous breakdown. Coupled with an almost constant drumbeat of scandal elsewhere in the media -- from the fabrications of Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith, and Mike Barnicle to the Time-CNN nerve-gas fiasco -- it appeared the press was in the midst of a major crisis. (See "It Was a Very Bad Year," right.) It was, but not for the reasons generally supposed.
Disgusted as the public claims to be by the media's obsession with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, at least in that case the press managed to accomplish its basic mission of reporting the news with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Elsewhere, it was the sort of year that the media can only hope will be seen as the nadir. It was a very bad year
The first scandal of 1998 remains the most entertaining: the revelation last spring that Stephen Glass, a brilliant young writer for the New Republic, had fabricated virtually entire worlds in his seemingly well-reported, anecdote-laden feature stories. The Church of George Herbert Walker Christ? Didn't exist. Young Republican sex orgies? Really, now. A cabbie who is robbed while Glass is sitting in the back seat? Hmm -- now that you mention it, how come the guy didn't rob Glass as well?
By contrast, the scandals that ended the careers of Boston Globe columnists Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle were depressingly prosaic. Smith, a Pulitzer finalist this year, was becoming one of the country's best-known African-American writers when she was found to have invented characters and quotes. Barnicle, despite a 25-year career plagued by accusations of plagiarism, fabrication, and libel, was the paper's most popular columnist when what he called his "sloppiness" finally brought him down. To make things worse, editor Matt Storin's reputation took a hit when it was learned that he had covered up previous Smith fabrications in 1995, and when he briefly let Barnicle back into the fold in the midst of this summer's plagiarism controversy. To no one's surprise, Storin was forced to flip-flop a week later amid new charges of fabrication and plagiarism. By year's end, Storin appeared to be in charge once again, but it's going to be some time before the wounds heal.
The Glass, Barnicle, and Smith debacles are, ultimately, stories of personal failure. Far more disturbing was the report by CNN and Time magazine that US forces had used nerve gas against defectors during the Vietnam War. The story, more than a year in the making, was retracted within days when it became clear that CNN researcher April Oliver had relied far too extensively on unreliable, contradictory sources. Famed war correspondent Peter Arnett saved his job and destroyed his career by washing his hands of the whole story, claiming -- truthfully, no doubt -- that he hadn't had a thing to do with the content of the voice-over he provided for TV or the article that appeared under his byline in Time.
The biggest victim of the CNN fiasco may well have been investigative reporting in general, which suffered another setback when the Cincinnati Enquirer, owned by the controversy-averse Gannett chain, paid $10 million to the Chiquita banana company and published a front-page apology on three consecutive days after it was revealed that reporter (make that former reporter) Michael Gallagher had based at least some of his reporting on stolen company voice-mails. Never mind that Gallagher had reported, apparently accurately, on Chiquita's illegal real-estate deals in Guatemala and Colombia, and on its use of a pesticide, banned in the US, that may have killed a young worker in Costa Rica. A generation ago, Gallagher's enterprise would have been rewarded; now, as NPR's Daniel Schorr observed, investigative reporting is being criminalized.
The year's best media story took place within the hallowed halls of the New Yorker, where David Remnick was named to replace the queen of buzz, Tina Brown, as editor. Brown gave the magazine a much-needed jolt of relevance, but her excesses -- symbolized by a glitzy-but-boring spread on a dominatrix published just before her departure for Disney -- were beginning to get in the way. Remnick combines Brown's pop-culture sensibility with the seriousness of past editors Harold Ross and, especially, William Shawn. More important, Remnick's elevation shows that the Newhouse chain isn't ready to give up just yet on its money-losing crown jewel.
With newspaper circulation continuing to drop and media corporations continuing to downsize despite flowing ad revenues, Boston actually strengthened its reputation as a vibrant two-newspaper town. In September, Boston Herald publisher-owner Pat Purcell unveiled color, a catchy new design, and expanded coverage of local news and culture. And the Globe, for all its self-inflicted damage, remains -- under the ownership of the New York Times Company -- one of the most generously staffed regional newspapers in the country, with a full complement of Washington reporters, a roster of national and foreign correspondents, and an ongoing commitment to in-depth and investigative reporting.
It's almost enough to make you forget about Leslie Boorse.
The media were in full handwringing mode practically before the infamous stain on Monica Lewinsky's Gap dress was dry. The wail went up: What have we done? Why can't we stop ourselves? Constantly, the media told their public that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was the result of wretched media excess. Not surprisingly, the public responded by telling the media, in the perpetual-feedback loop known as polls, that what they most hated about the scandal was wretched media excess.
You might have thought that the events of the past week would shake the media out of their self-regarding stupor. Because the real story of 1998 was not the media but, rather, actual events far beyond the media's control or influence. Indeed, at the very moment that Sam Donaldson was grinning knowingly at Peter Jennings, CNN was running a remarkable split-screen. On one side: the House floor, where the votes were being tallied on the third article of impeachment. On the other: Christiane Amanpour, back on the rooftop in Baghdad, the mosque across the street visible through the greenish glow of the nightscope while bombs and anti-aircraft fire exploded behind her. Out of view, stage right: Speaker-never-to-be Bob Livingston, brought down by his own bimbo eruptions -- exposed not by the media (unless the term is now so all-inclusive as to be meaningless), but by a wheelchair-bound pornographer offering million-dollar bounties.
It was the triumph of reality over spin. But the media, overflowing with arrogance and narcissism, fail to recognize it as anything more than backdrop to the ongoing drama about themselves.
"Why this orgy of self-hating?" asked National Journal media critic William Powers in a piece last August. "The most basic reason is that journalists simply need to be liked. So do most people, of course, but journalists may feel the need a little more keenly. As teenagers, most of us were geeks and losers and anti-jocks, and we went into a species of show business at least partly to satisfy a deep craving for status and popularity. So we join the public in panning the messenger, in hopes that this will buy back a measure of acceptance."
Powers is at least partly right, but I would argue that the phenomenon goes a lot deeper. People in the media have convinced themselves, through constant repetition bordering on self-hypnosis, that they work in the most influential, powerful institution in the world. Analyzing and explaining this supposed monolith is the ultimate growth industry. Media critics, think tanks, and various academics have a vested interest in convincing the public (and themselves) of the importance of what they are doing, too. The media are a constant topic of television and radio shows. Listen to Imus in the Morning, for instance, and you may come to believe that the entire country is run by approximately six members of the national media and the politicians who are smart enough to suck up to them.
This view is perpetuated by the media themselves, which do, for better or (mainly) worse, have a monopoly on the national conversation. Trouble is, while everyone is conversing, reality is happening elsewhere.
It's true enough that the media have expanded exponentially in the past few years. Where once there were the three broadcast networks and maybe three or four nationally influential newspapers, today there is 24-hour cable news, endless talk shows, and the Internet, where a self-proclaimed nonjournalist such as Matt Drudge can break the Lewinsky story even as the more-responsible editors of Newsweek battle with each other over whether they should go with it or not. Surely the nightly shoutfests that have enriched Chris Matthews, Geraldo Rivera, and, until recently, Keith Olbermann (at least Matthews and Rivera have had the decency not to complain about their good fortune) represent something new and different -- and potentially harmful, if more than a handful of scandal junkies actually watched them.
But most reporters' jobs aren't much different from what they were a generation ago. And journalists don't report the truth, they report what people tell them. The Lewinsky scandal wasn't about the media. It was about a rogue prosecutor off on a $40 million thong-sniffing expedition, and a president who barely gave it a second thought before perjuring himself when he got caught. It was about a national Republican Party that would rather subvert the Constitution than compete fairly at the polls. It was about a White House spinning operation so sophisticated and pervasive that the Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, wrote an entire book about it (Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine) earlier this year. In a follow-up in the current Vanity Fair, Kurtz describes machinations evocative of the intrigue in, say, the French royal court of the 18th century, with Hillary telling a flack last August to alert the press that her husband had, in fact, misled her about his relationship with Lewinsky.
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The lengths to which some critics will go to blame all this on the media are astounding. Take the cover story of the current Washington Monthly, by social critic Todd Gitlin. Titled "The Clinton-Lewinsky Obsession: How the Press Made a Scandal of Itself," the piece makes a lot of valuable observations, both factual (Gitlin recounts how Starr, as a federal appeals-court judge, ingratiated himself with the Washington Post by overturning a libel decision against the paper) and atmospheric (Gitlin is surely on to something when he observes that aging baby-boom journalists see, in Clinton's unattractive appetites, the selves they don't like).
But Gitlin's argument is flawed in a way that is characteristic of the genre: he grossly overestimates the media's importance in bringing Clinton to his present predicament. He even goes so far as to argue that the Sunday-morning blab shows (This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, et al.) set the agenda for government, "because official Washington and its eavesdroppers watch the Sunday shows in order to know what they had better take into account as they plot their own moves."
The truth is that rather than being driven by the media, the impeachment vote was about radical Republicans (ironically, the congressmen and senators who impeached and nearly removed Andrew Johnson were also known as radical Republicans) hijacking the Constitution in order to win through procedural tricks what they had twice lost at the ballot box. In an important op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times, Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office (1992), argued that for most of the 1990s the Republican Party has been trying to seize power through extraconstitutional means. His examples include then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole's unprecedented routine use of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation in 1993 and '94; the Republican-engineered removal of independent counsel Robert Fiske in 1994, which resulted in Starr's appointment; and Speaker Newt Gingrich's decision in 1995 to shut down the government rather than attempt to override Clinton's veto of a budget resolution. Impeachment, Ehrenhalt wrote, is "the climax of a six-year period marred by a troubling and deepening failure of the Republican Party to play within the established constitutional rules."
Given that reality, the continuing obsession with media excess does us all a huge disservice, both because it obscures the fact that coverage of the scandal has been much more accurate than is generally understood, and because it shifts the focus from the radical Republicans, where it ought to be placed, onto the messengers instead. In a piece in the left-liberal Nation last September, media critic Eric Alterman contended that if Clinton were removed from office, it would be the result of a "punditocracy firestorm of antidemocratic moralism" led by, among others, Bill Kristol and George Will. In the online magazine Salon last weekend, novelist Diane Johnson ended her semi-coherent anti-impeachment harangue with: "If only we could impeach George Will and Cokie Roberts!"
A careful perusal of the House roll call reveals that neither Will, Kristol, nor Roberts cast a single vote.
Surveys have shown that, until recently, Americans didn't take the prospect of impeachment seriously. Their response to the Lewinsky scandal was to reward her former paramour with ever-higher approval ratings. Pundits scratched their heads, wondering whether the public had lost interest in morality, politics, or both. The truth is more complicated: having been told constantly that the Lewinsky affair was nothing but hyped-up sensationalism, the public responded by rewarding Bill Clinton, the supposed victim of this sensationalism. That, in turn, obscured the reality that Ken Starr and the radical Republicans were moving inexorably toward impeachment.
Let it be stipulated that the media did, indeed, devote a hell of a lot of coverage to the Lewinsky scandal. And why not? Given a choice between a story about an attractive 21-year-old who serviced the president in or near the Oval Office and an analysis of the various options to reform Social Security, most people, sensibly, will choose the former. And arguments that the press should put Clinton's "personal" life off limits are ludicrous. First, it was Starr, with all the awesome power of the Independent Counsel Act, who was doing the prying, not the media. Second, Clinton wasn't just carrying on an affair; he was engaged in reprehensible, exploitative behavior, and in the workplace at that. Third, Clinton was suspected of perjuring himself, urging others to perjure themselves, and obstructing justice in his effort to cover up the affair -- to spare himself and his family embarrassment, to be sure, but also to stymie Paula Jones's high-profile sexual-harassment suit.
Even though the media got it mostly right most of the time, the guilt overrode the reporting as soon as the initial rush was over. CNN ran a two-hour, town meeting-style event on "media madness." Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government hosted a forum at which White House aide Rahm Emanuel lectured U.S. News & World Report columnist Gloria Borger on the use of anonymous sources, and Boston Globe columnist John Ellis revealed (gasp!) that he had actually received some off-the-record information from Starr's office. The Committee of Concerned Journalists, chaired by the estimable Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation, harrumphed in February that "from the earliest moments of the Clinton crisis, the press routinely intermingled reporting with opinion and speculation -- even on the front page," and that "40 percent of all reporting based on anonymous sourcing was from a single source."
The media's anti-media backlash picked up in March, when both the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review published highly critical cover stories. "Innuendo quickly replaced hard facts," wrote Sherry Ricchiardi in the AJR. " 'Sources say' became the phrase du jour, often without any indication where those sources might be coming from. 'If it is true' became the fashionable disclosure." In the CJR, veteran political journalist Jules Witcover denounced his colleagues' "piranha-like frenzy in pursuit of the relatively few tidbits tossed into the journalistic waters" -- and the "rumor, gossip, and, especially, hollow sourcing, making the reports of some mainstream outlets scarcely distinguishable from supermarket tabloids." Witcover was especially outraged that the media had passed along such unsubstantiated hearsay as the existence of a semen-stained dress and Clinton's belief that oral sex isn't really sex. Ten months later, Witcover's screed stands not as testimony to his good judgment but, rather, as embarrassing evidence of how much better sourced his younger competitors were and are.
The biggest splash was made by the biggest fish: Steven Brill, the pugnacious founder of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, who unveiled the debut issue of his new magazine, Brill's Content, in June. (Content -- a publication founded by a media mogul to explain the media to the masses -- is in itself a prime example of the media's obsession with themselves.) Brill led with a self-penned piece that he dubbed "Pressgate" -- an execrably written 24,000-word narrative flawed in its caustic dismissal of some pretty good reporting and by Brill's own intellectual dishonesty. Brill had failed to reveal that he was a contributor to Democratic candidates, including Clinton, in years past. And his Claude Rains-like shock that Starr's office leaked to reporters was disingenuous coming from a journalist-lawyer who is intimately familiar with the way prosecutors work.
Nevertheless, Brill made one major contribution to our understanding of the story, and it's something that more media critics should have picked up on. By making Ken Starr -- and, to a lesser extent, literary agent Lucianne Goldberg and the loathsome Linda Tripp -- the center of the story, he explicitly acknowledged that the media were mere pawns in this high-stakes chess game. "What makes the media's performance a true scandal, a true example of an institution being corrupted to its core," read the subhead, "is that the competition for scoops so bewitched everyone that they let the man in power write the story -- once Tripp and Goldberg put it together for him."
Flawed as Brill's analysis is, his conclusion -- that this story is Starr-driven, not media-driven -- is crucial to understanding what is now unfolding. Indeed, though time has shown that the media have done a reasonably good job of reporting the facts, they've completely missed the larger truths that are only now starting to come into focus.
It's exactly the opposite of what happened in Vietnam and Watergate, when journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein unearthed shocking facts that illuminated unwelcome truths about an immoral war and a corrupt administration. This time, journalists have dutifully regurgitated facts that have been spoon-fed to them. The truth -- the real aim of Starr and the radical Republicans -- has been obscured.
The goal all along has been to drive Clinton from office -- to destroy a man who symbolizes the counterculture, at least to those who never understood what the counterculture was about. To get even with the Democrats who drove Richard Nixon out of office. To repeal the 1960s. That's the only thing that can explain the Republicans' grotesquely disproportionate response to Clinton's swinish behavior and low crimes. Even Clinton-bashing pundits such as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Times editorial-page editor Howell Raines backed down once Starr's report revealed Starr to be a sex-obsessed moralist who had been unable to dig up anything on Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, and all the other so-called scandals he had originally been charged with investigating.
Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky, and his possibly criminal cover-up, were revolting enough that he should have resigned months ago. But he didn't -- and, as the Washington Post's lead editorial last Sunday argued, he now has to stay, because to leave would be to reward the radical Republicans for their efforts to tear down the Constitution by means of an entirely partisan impeachment inquiry. Yes, the Clinton inquiry is about more than sex, but sex is the prime ingredient. The sexual hypocrisy of anti-Clinton radicals such as Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, and Helen Chenoweth -- all exposed, while the elite media were navel-gazing, either by Larry Flynt or by small news organizations -- is all the proof that most Americans need, if poll results are to be believed.
We now know more than we'll ever need to know about how the president conducted himself -- everything from where and how he touched Monica Lewinsky to where and how he tried to mastermind a cover-up. The media did a good job of reporting it. They enjoyed it. So did we. As that misanthrope Alexander Cockburn recently observed in the New York Press, when Americans claim they're sickened by the story, they're kidding the pollsters, themselves, or both.
But in the weeks and months to come, a lot more is going to be required of the media. We are now in the midst of a constitutional crisis in which Clinton's misbehavior is a convenient excuse, not a precipitating cause. The same Republican Party that played dirty tricks against the Democratic opposition in 1972, that questioned Michael Dukakis's mental health and his wife's patriotism in 1988, that smeared Clinton with treason allegations in 1992, and that has been trying to drive him out of office since Inauguration Day 1993 now has its goal within its grasp.
The question the media must ask themselves as 1999 dawns is whether they will continue to be passive conveyors of facts -- or active pursuers of truth.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.
Copyright © 1998 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.
